


The gift of time

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Happy Christmas - here's a story about a kind of gift, Planetary time "zones" don't always match, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, a peaceful moment for those who have very little peace, because time to oneself is a gift to those who never have any, character exploration, freedom and thinking about freedom, mood piece, unexpected morning off
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 09:49:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13144125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: Jyn and Cassian have an unexpected morning off after someone miscalculates the relationship between ship-time and planetary day length at their destination.





	The gift of time

Hiking shoes; they don’t look normal, somehow, after decades of his footwear simply being whatever are the most solid and hard-wearing boots the rebels can get a supply of.  But these are proper, specialist walking shoes with grip soles and waxed laces, and a little manufacturer’s logo on the side.  The smell of fresh waterproofing treatment rises as he opens the box.

“Fancy, aren’t they?” says Jyn. “One of our more useful covers, don’t you think?  Seeing as you get new boots out of it?”

“They look – clean.”  Cassian sets the shoes down on the deck and works his right foot into one thoughtfully.  “And over-elaborate.” 

“Bit too pretty, I know.  But at least we’ll both be able to walk in them.”

She’s got her own pair on already, taking seriously the advice to break them in before the trek from the landing site into the alpine village where the pick-up is due to take place.  A tour group hiking the mountains, a good cover story for a party of over twenty new recruits from seven different planets.

He tightens the laces; wriggles his feet experimentally in the gleaming new shoes.  The top-stitched synthskin is lightweight and comfortable, and surprisingly supportive.  “Not bad.  They’ll be okay.”

“I rather like them,” says Jyn.  “ Not like those heels I got stuck in, last time.”

They grin at one another, remembering; a moonlit garden, and a cushioned seat secluded by blossoming roses, and half an hour to occupy before their extraction arrived.

Which reminds Cassian of the other, more peculiar, worry about this mission.  “I’m more concerned about the time difference.  The balancing calculation between planetary days is tricky; I’m not entirely sure Lt Sensamma got it right.  The day on Duer Hakkar is less than 15 standard hours long.  A miscalculation could leave us off-schedule by a day or more.”

“You don’t trust Sensamma?”

“He’s a fine Intelligence operative, but I’ve no idea if his maths is any good.”

It isn’t, as it turns out.  They’re a day early.

There are worse places to be stuck for 15 hours.  They have plenty of rations, and the backpacks they’ve been issued as part of their cover contain clean shirts and underwear, quadnocs, and blocks of hikers’ sugar-cake.  They have to wait, so they can start their hike down to the rendezvous and arrive on schedule; but it’s no burden having to spend half a standard day in the alpine uplands of Duer Hakkar.  This is a place that attracts tourists for a reason.

The meadow where they’ve put the shuttle down is the size of several smashball pitches, and lush with native grasses and wildflowers.  Along the eastern side a ridge slopes down and a stream runs from the shadow of a forest of high-altitude dilquot trees, running in bright splashing song to the edge of the cliff, where it tumbles away in a waterfall a hundred feet high. 

The air is cold and clear and pure, and smells of spring, and the horizon is violet and blue and shades of white-gold; a haze of light fading into endlessness.

It’s mid-morning, local time. 

Cassian heats a couple of packs of carb-rations while Jyn makes kaf, and they sit on the ramp and look at the view.

“Are there briefs to read or anything?”

“Not that I know of.  No reports to write up, either.”

“Same for me.  All up to date.”

“What are we going to do?” he wonders. 

“It isn’t a full day off,” Jyn says.  “Just a planetary day.  Less than fifteen hours; and we’ll still need to sleep for part of it.  Only a morning off, really.”

“Not that it makes it any easier to know what to do with it.”  He finishes his kaf and tips the pot to get a half-cup more.  “I could run some engine checks.  Just in case.”

Jyn leans over and places a small kiss on the corner of his mouth.  “Go ahead.  I’m going for a stroll.”

“A stroll?”  It sounds – almost frivolous.  Indulgent.

“Yeah.  I’m meant to be a keen hiker, right?  Might as well get into character.  I haven’t been anywhere this beautiful since – since – I don’t know when.”

Cassian nods slowly, thinking. “I don’t know when I last had a morning when there was absolutely nothing I needed to do.”

“You just said you were going to do an engine check.”

“I don’t _need_ to, though.”  Her kiss had tasted of oatmeal and hot black kaf; he pulls her back for another one.  “May I join you on your stroll?  Let’s enjoy our time here; when did we last have time?”

“The gift of time,” Jyn says, musing, smiling. 

She takes his hand.

They walk down quietly through the open field of grass to the cliff edge, where the slope drops off, and the shining water with it.  The voice of the waterfall is loud and happy, like a shouting child.

The sun is almost overhead already by the time they reach the banks of the stream.  It’s hot, in the noonday light at this altitude; and there’s something dreamlike and charming abut a day that passes at double time.  Cassian shrugs off his jacket and spreads it on the grass where it’s shortest and most dense, near the water’s edge; he sits on part of it, patting the remaining section.  “Join me?”

Jyn folds herself neatly down onto the fabric, tucking her knees together; she leans into him and he wraps an arm round her.  The warm air is very still.  Somewhere high up an avian creature hums and sings, long high notes running on, endless as the water.

“Remember the first time I put my arm round you?  You had to hold me up...”

Jyn nods.  “Yes.”  She doesn’t need to say more.  How far they’ve come, to be able to wake and be here; and every morning they have now was won on the back of that day of miracles.

She wraps her own arm about his waist and presses in close to him, silently.

The view is wide, all around them; a sky huge as memory, and a panorama of deep combes and glens and lilac-blue peaks that grow misty and ever more pale with distance.  The green grass around them slopes away sharply to the south of the cliff and the waterfall; a narrow track of beaten earth runs by below, pale gold, a thread to guide them towards the town in the next valley.

They’re up high; very, very high.  He can see for – miles.  Miles and miles; that farthest ridge over there must be at least twenty miles off.  Open, clear air all around; emptiness; and no obligation, no ties or orders binding these few hours down.  Every direction he looks is full of empty space and possibility, and hope.

In a strange, green way it feels like Fest.  Like home, and youth.

“It reminds me of Onderon,” Jyn says quietly, her breath on his neck.

“Onderon?”  It isn’t what he would have expected, Onderon was a jungle world, but perhaps –

“Not in the way it looks.  Yavin was more like Onderon that way.  I mean the way it feels.  The – the space.”  She thinks, hesitates, adds “And it’s beautiful.  Onderon was beautiful.”

“Yes.”  It still moves him hugely, when she is feeling her way through words like this.  And yes, this answers his thought; it’s the same for her, this moment between times, looking out at a new world.  In this as in so much else they are mirrors for one another.  

“It’s strange not to be studying an objective.  To just have time to sit and look, and listen.”

“And breathe.”  Jyn inhales deeply as if proving her words, rubs her head against his cheek.  When he looks down at her she is smiling, with her eyes closed.

“Yes, breathe,” he says.  Breathes and presses a kiss to her forehead.  “This air, it – it feels clean.  Empty.  It’s been such a long time since I’ve had time – you know what our life is, always straight off on the next mission, looking for the next target, hurrying to the next drop point, the next rendezvous, on and on.  And to not even have a report to check; it’s –“ he shakes his head, the tip of his tongue pushing at the taste of words and finding none that feel quite right.

“Freedom,” suggests Jyn.

It’s as good a term as any.  “Yeah.  And I don’t know what to do with it.”

Jyn tucks her head further under his chin and hugs him tighter.  The bird is still singing far above them, faint rising notes fading against the joy of the creek as it shouts on, immediate and alive and almost at his feet.

“It’s only a few hours,” Jyn says.  “Only a taste.”

“And I – I like the taste.  I do.  I’d like to have more, sometime.  It’s just so – unfamiliar.  I haven’t – tasted this, in so long,  Since I was –“

He sighs.  Neither of them say it.

Cassian runs his fingers through the grass at his side.  There are small low-growing plants with yellow and tawny-green flowers close by, and in the longer grass at arms-reach is another flower, pale blue like ice; wide open bells on a long stem, and lance-shaped buds.

He nips off one of the green-gold flowers with his fingernail and studies it.  Six petals, velvety textured, dusted with pollen from six stamens of a blue so dark it’s almost black.  Across each petal run little honey-coloured veins radiating out from the centre.  It’s almost like the iris of a beautiful eye.

He shows it to Jyn.

“Symmetry,” she says.

“And beauty, no?”   Cassian lifts the flower and tucks it into the hair on the crown of her head.  “And now it’s even more beautiful.”

“Daft man.”  But she doesn’t push his hand away, or the flower.  He picks another and adds it, and then one of the bright yellow ones, and a single delicate bell from one of the taller flowers.  Settles them all one by one in the clean chestnut hair where it’s drawn back and lies close against her skull.

The sun is past the zenith now.  When he strokes Jyn’s hair and lifts her face to his, it’s in her eyes and for a moment their tawny sea-green dazzles him. 

Light picks up the soft lines around her mouth as she smiles, and around her eyes as she screws them up.  She’s luminous, and she laughs as he kisses her. 


End file.
